Maybe it's time to stop blaming the standard and start blaming 1. Users who do not use modern browsers or 2. Developers that don't update/use the new toys out there :)
Furthermore, it's best that features are behind prefixes to be used for progressive enhancement and any major browser implements new features behind a prefix before it is accepted.
There is no "cross browser hacks" for any evergreen browser. Except, ironically given your statement, IE has a buggy implementation. Edge supports it and Microsoft is deprecating IE<11 and will hopefully fix the issues in IE11. The big issues can be avoided by not declaring a min-height.
However, if vertical alignment is still prefixed in 2015, I don't think I need to submit more for my case, downvoted as it may be.
Although the outdated example is largely to blame.
There is this too: http://willkoehler.net/2014/08/28/vertically-align-content-w...
There are a lot of ways, really.
As someone who writes CSS daily (css, less and scss), I've yet to understand how some people can have any issues at all with CSS. Sure, it's quirky but you can pretty much master it in a few months at most.
(That being said, I make my life a lot more easier by using tools such as autoprefixers, library of mixins that allow me to summon arcane CSS declarations at will, etc.)
Thanks Google, Apple and Microsoft.
Meanwhile, I have web pages on my hard drive that I designed in 1999 with vertical alignment (amongst other tricks), that worked in Netscape 4.x, Seamonkey 0.86, and still work in Firefox 42. and I never needed a -moz prefix.